Top-Down versus Bottom-Up approach

As you know, I have two intellectual lovers: Touristology and Web-Engineering, which I think are strongly related.
A case in point, a few days ago I went to a Tourist destination trying to dynamize their tourism activities. You know, the usual rules which make me love Touristology!
– You have to seek International Tourism,
– Aim to get more revenues AND profit for local companies through more control over the chain of value…
– Then create international routes…
I began to talk about the different approaches that they can follow if they want to be successful. For starters, Top-Down and Bottom-Up.
Our society is still rooted in waiting for the miracle, the hero, the big thing. So, it is easy to rely on Top Down approach… and to mention the successful case of the Camino de Santiago, you get a nomination as a heritage of humanity, you are lucky enough that Paulo Coelho writes a book about it and an American director shoots a movie… as a result you get plenty of tourists without any special or great effort for the population of the tourist destination.
A bottom-up approach on the other hand means a network of small and medium size companies working together as a single organization (CHAIN OF VALUE, remember?) using trial and error methodology and doing what it takes to get their goals! The final result is more control over the chain of value and, as a consequence, more profit and the trust of the tourist that will allow you to create international routes, but… you have to work hard. It is not an easy thing, but definitely worth it!
So, using bottom up approach in tourism means aiming to specific segments, then trying to build a chain of value putting together people and organizations, then trying to build tourism packages, some of them will work others no, then TRY again!!!!!
You can visualize this chain of value in this figure:

Where the goal is to create an efficient and organized network, based on decentralization and distributive Intelligence.
Dynamize a tourist destination following Bottom-up approach means to follow Tom Peter’s advice “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” You don’t rely on THE leader you create leaders.
At the same time, I was working with a webapp (porlets / JQuery) database oriented. As usual I wasn’t alone (I love to be surrounded by small teams of A+ Players!!!). The webapp was putting our faith and persistence to a test. I was repeating all the time (quietly for myself and louder for the team)
“Destiny tests your determination to succeed. This is just a test… Keep working!”
Finally, it works smoothly and clean! Soon you will see the results!
Suddenly I realized why Touristology resembles web-engineering! Web-Engineering is not Mathematics where you have your theorems and axioms and you can get a result following a top-down approach! In web-engineering you have a set of strategies and tactics and you try, you document the mistakes, create small modules which work and finally assemble all of them together. It’s a chain of value changing people by code and organizations for modules!!!
Bottom-up approach works in web-engineering and in Touristology. It’s a harder path but at the end the tourist destination will create their own companies with knowledge, abilities and contacts to become successful.
– Jordi I don’t see the differences between Top-Down and Bottom-up approach
– Neither do I!
– See Jordi, you have to explain this better!
– Ok, OK let’s leave this in the savvy hands of my Touristologists… Can you explain the difference with your own words? Can you give specific examples? Hmm, it’s starting to smell like a Study Case around here!
Come on Touristologists! Use your brain, you will help other to understand Touristology and on the journey… you will become a Touristologist!!!